Speech on Comrade Zinoviev’s Report on the Role of the Party [1]

Wellred

Core Argument

In this speech to the Second World Congress of the Communist International in July 1920, Trotsky defends the necessity of the revolutionary party against both reformist betrayal and syndicalist hostility. He opens by noting the paradox that three-quarters of a century after the Communist Manifesto, the question of the party’s necessity must still be debated at an international communist congress. He dismisses the complacent view, expressed by Paul Levi, that the question has been settled for the majority of Western workers, arguing that this conflates the reformist parties of the Second International—which have handed the working class over to bourgeois service—with the genuine proletarian party. The real problem, Trotsky insists, is that in countries like France, Spain, and the United States, revolutionary syndicalists who genuinely wish to destroy the bourgeoisie nevertheless reject the party form, believing it inseparable from parliamentary corruption and opportunism.

Trotsky draws on his own experience with French syndicalists during the war, recalling that the first courageous voices against the war in France came from a small group around Monatte and Rosmer, men with anarchist pasts. He contrasts them sharply with figures like Renaudel or Albert Thomas, who understood the need for a party but used it to serve capitalism. The French syndicalists, he argues, already function in practice as a revolutionary minority with a programme, organisation, and discipline—that is, as a party in embryo. Their own experience of struggle will compel them to recognise the need for a communist party.

The speech then turns to polemics with two specific delegates. Against the Spanish syndicalist Pestaña, who refuses to discuss the party for fear of insulting the revolution, Trotsky argues that the very act of returning to Spain with the Congress’s theses and asking his comrades to vote on them will constitute the founding of the Spanish Communist Party. Against the Italian Socialist Serrati, who accuses the Bolsheviks of opportunism for making concessions to the middle peasantry, Trotsky offers a defence grounded in the realities of state power. The working class, he explains, inherits backward and barbaric relations from feudalism and capitalism; it cannot transform them overnight. Concessions to the peasantry are not opportunism—defined as concessions to the ruling class that help it remain in power—but necessary manoeuvres by a revolutionary class that holds power and must accelerate the evolution of backward layers. He cites the Brest-Litovsk treaty and the retreat before English imperialism as analogous manoeuvres. Mistakes, he concludes, are inevitable, but they enter the party’s inventory—the accumulated experience of the working class concentrated in its vanguard organisation.